I used to think we heard more about celebrity sex scandals now because we hear more about celebrities, period. But in light of Tiger Woods and Jesse James and Tiki Barber and Mark Sanford and Eliot Spitzer — and the finance guy husband who just left a writer I know (and their two kids) for a 22-year-old of indeterminate vocation after 15 years of marriage — I hereby alter my stance.

We’re reading more infidelity stories than ever because men, celeb and civilian, are more unfaithful than ever.

We assume it only seems that way, that surely men were always this same level of insatiable and that we just didn’t hear about it in the halcyon “Mad Men” era before every guy had to tiptoe through today’s wirelessly connected, satellite-assisted minefield of self-incrimination traps to get to a girl on the side. But for every indiscretion the Web 2.0 era can take credit for divulging, there are 10 or 20 or 100 it also enabled in the first place.

Who among us, after all, hasn’t been cheated on? And for anyone who can still safely raise her hand after three or so single years in New York, who among you hasn’t slept with a dude whose girlfriend never found out about it? And what would you tell her if one day she happened to spend a session hyperventilating over the contents of his inadvertently open inbox and decided to call you?

When this happened to me once, the woman asked the same question I’d probably ask in her shoes, whether I thought she could possibly stay with him. I had no idea; our thing had been brief and fraught and four years earlier and I had cut it off specifically because I didn’t want to ever be in her situation. But was that even possible?

Consider Tiger Woods’ headmistress Rachel Uchitel. As a Bloomberg producer turned high-end nightclub concierge, Uchitel had spent almost a decade at the center of a stunningly well-coordinated high-end adultery ring. She schmoozed with uberrich men in exclusive clubs, kept a running BlackBerry tally of their specific preferences and propensities and furnished their tables with bespoke lineups of hot girls willing to flirt and possibly engage in a sliding scale of extracurricular activities. It’s not prostitution, mostly because the girls invariably would never describe themselves as whores. They get paid as well as high-end prostitutes — but mostly in jewelry and travel and dresses and “gifts.”

The half-hooker economy, as New York magazine dubbed it, is a direct outgrowth of the stratospheric rise in Wall Street compensation. The “whales” — as they term the wealthiest clients — are predominantly finance guys, most of whom these days make in a year the annual gross revenue of the nightclubs they’re patronizing. You don’t get that rich by ignoring numbers, and you don’t ring up Amex bills every month the way whales do without seeing sex, marriage and companionship as fundamentally transactional services, each of which are probably most optimally performed by specialists in the field.

That cynicism has trickled all the way to the dive bar romance market. Editors and graphic designers and the (often unemployed) types of dudes I generally date do whatever they can to put commitment off the table pending the accumulation of some unspecified but vast sum of wealth. They generally credit their “unavailability” as the primary source of their appeal. They’ll tell you that women their age are too demanding and marriage-obsessed. And they continue this way for so long that if, for some reason, one capitulates to actual marriage, he will often take the first chance he can get to cheat, if only to reclaim his former some sort of lost identity.

When there’s a market for picking a woman like you’re selecting an item off a menu, why choose just one? The average New York man may not be able to afford as many as Tiger Woods, but too many of them think that’s something to aspire to — not something to lament.